nathanpowell.org » lifehacking

White noise

Nathan Powell — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:46:20 +0000

I found a site that has free mp3′s of whitenoise. Download one, then in the shell
mplayer -loop 0 foo.mp3

That will loop over and over forever.

The only problem so far is when the file starts over there is some silence. That is distracting, however I am going to see if I can edit the file tonite, Or at least find a longer one.

Mass closing of comments for WordPress

Nathan Powell — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:08:28 +0000

I couldn’t seem to find in the admin section how to mass close posts for commenting. When spam gets past Akismet it’s usually for a really old post. So I looked in the database and made the change by hand
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'closed' WHERE ID < 283;

**UPDATE** Heh, right after I posted this, I got some ping spam...
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status = 'closed' WHERE ID < 283;

Taskr

Nathan Powell — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 00:19:33 +0000

I wrote a command line ToDo list manager in ruby this morning. It’s not feature complete and it’s not uber robust. It’s for small ToDo lists. You can get it here if you like.

sudo cp taskr.rb /usr/bin/taskr taskr -h

-i isn’t there yet, gotta save something .02 :)

For those of you that don’t read comments | Yahoo Pipes

Nathan Powell — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:35:23 +0000

For those of you who don’t read the comments here (shame on you, the people that read this blog are a lot smarter than me and say much more poignant things than I) I think this comment deserves a post of it’s own.

David, a buddy of mine, saw my plight with the Dubner post below, and fixed it with this Yahoo Pipe. Pretty trick if you ask me.

Life Hack: Toothbrush

Nathan Powell — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 18:51:25 +0000

I buy those cheap battery powered toothbrushes, and they are great, make my teeth nice and clean, but they have a serious design flaw. Namely, once the batteries die, it’s really tough to get them back together after changing the batteries.

It’s a simple problem really. The o-ring which acts as a gasket, keeping water away from the batteries, gets caught on the lip of the handle when you go to put it back together. What I do is clean it real good, spray a little PAM cooking spray on my finger and coat the gasket. Makes it go right back together.

Happy brushing!

Bash History Life Hack

Nathan Powell — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:14:50 +0000

I use my shell to take quick notes I don’t want to forget. Like a phone number or an address, so I can look them up later.

I first make sure I have a long bash_history (in ~/.bashrc):

HISTSIZE=1500 HISTFILESIZE=1500

export HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE

Then when someone gives me something I need for later, I type that in my shell and hit enter. Bash complains that the command is not found, and writes it to my history. Later, I hit ctrl+r and type a few letters or numbers and it’s displayed.

Simplifying

Nathan Powell — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:23:13 +0000

Lifehack: I know it’s a little trashy to do, but I put an old beat up exercize bike on my sidewalk with a free sign on it. Someone took it! w00t. Now, I need to find other things in here … Continue reading →